This invention relates to displaying a table of data and has particular but not exclusive application to providing a tabular display of data on a mobile device with a restricted screen display area, such as a mobile telephone handset or a personal digital assistant (PDA).
Conventional mobile telecommunications devices, such as telephone handsets, have been designed primarily for speech calls and have only a limited capability for handling data. For example, in GSM, a short message service (SMS) has been provided to permit the user to send and receive short text messages that can be transmitted through a cellular public land mobile network (PLMN). More recently, recommendations have been developed to provide a wireless application protocol (WAP) to promote common standards and specifications for data services that operate over wireless communication networks. WAP enabled telephone handsets have been developed which allow the user to access remote servers. Data content is provided in a markup language, similar to conventional hypertext markup language (HTML), known as wireless markup language (WML), which is configured to allow a page of HTML data to be displayed as a deck of individual cards which are of a size suited for display on the relatively small display screen usually available on a mobile device such as a cellular telephone handset or PDA.
A WAP server can be accessed by dialling an individual telephone number associated with a WAP gateway which acts as a proxy server between the WAP server itself and the mobile device which acts as a client. Thus, individual WAP servers can be accessed by a user, by dialling the telephone numbers associated with the individual WAP gateways that provide access to the servers.
WML allows tables to be defined comprising rows and columns of cells. There is no upper limit on the number of rows and column that can be specified and so a service provider can provide from its server a table with a larger number of rows and columns than can conveniently be displayed by means of the restricted display usually associated with a mobile device such as a mobile telephone handset or PDA. The present invention seeks to overcome this problem.